26 September 2012

It's a comparison of global salaries - all well and good, and apparently the UK average salary is one of the world's highest, basically the same as the yanks in parity terms

Only, I'm perplexed, Americans I know generally feel they earn less when in the UK - and I know from experience our average salary of £24k is pretty dire

If you can buy say, a can of coke for $1 in the US, and your salary is 44k US, then it should be about 60p here, yet invariably they spend a dollar like we spend a pound (completely hypothetical coke price)

That makes Britain more expensive, not cheaper (or near equal) - a view backed up by the OECD figures, which state a $100 basket of goods will cost you $132 in the UK

So you earn £1996 a month, which buys you $3239 currency, but that's worth $2453 in parity terms

This seems reasonable - I worked at that pay level, and it won't buy you a house very quickly

Meanwhile Australia ranks quite low down the scale, at a meagre 2600 - so what they're saying is £2000 is worth 15% more than AU$5,500

I'm calling BS on this - having worked in both countries, I know the pay is much better in Oz, and I earnt slightly less than average, but it went a lot further

The Australian dollar is of course, worth less - but the OECD figures put it at costing $157 for $100 - even if I exclude the current exchange rate which is above parity, the average Aussie wage is $3500, including exchange rate it's more like $3600

This puts the Ozzies very far in front - but incidentally this chart also disagrees with the official stats of the US government, which say a yank's median income is $45k - obviously parity doesn't come into it in the US so it's a pretty easy calculation - why this chart has taken $400 off the average I don't know

So I call BS on this whole thing - the British average wage is fifth in the world, ahead of all major European nations? While the Aussies, who can buy more US than their own currency, apparently fork out more than double what the yanks do? If you compare the UK and Australia, what they're saying is the pound is worth more than three Aussie dollars, while it may be undervalued at current rates, it's never 3 to 1

Me:

That's Proper Liberalism

About me

Tarquin is a lazy, good-for-nothing, would-be historian who gets easily distracted by idiocy, hypocrisy (particularly of politicians) and football.

The name Tarquin comes from a couple of late Roman kings, and also from a Monty Python sketch, and possibly from some hippies I annoyed several years ago. Peter Hitchens has a problem with my name for some reason, the only reasoning for this seems to be that he thinks it's not a real name...which I'm pretty sure it is, although I'm open to being proven wrong.

Favourite hobbies include: eating, reading, shouting at the TV, watching football and pontificating.